28 May 2016

Obama the Sociopath, Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons

The Right-wing media assails Obama for his 'apology tours' in
places like Cuba, Vietnam and Japan.

The reality couldn't be more different. He's not apologizing.
His tours are exercises in smug triumphalism and obfuscation of the historical
record.

If you actually listen to the speeches they are filled with
historical revision, lies and condescending platitudes. The Right-wing pundits
are right in that these speeches are disgusting displays, but not for the
reasons they think.

They are so insulting that frankly if I were a leader in Cuba
or Vietnam I would have to stop him mid-speech and send him packing. They are odious
exhibitions of rank hubris and audacity.

Vietnam's legacy after the American War is a poor one.
Freedom was certainly crushed and yet for a society that endured decades of
war, the new unified government provided a degree of stability and peace. Its
society was in chaos and its land in tatters.

Hanoi is not to be praised and it receives no accolades from
any sector of political opinion. Socialists decry its Stalinism and its
eventual turn to market capitalism in the 1980s. It broke faith with its
population and turned them into a cheap labour platform as has the government
in Beijing. This is hardly communism or socialism, let alone Left-wing.

They have degenerated into an authoritarian state dominated
by a capitalist ruling class, an utter betrayal of the goals, aims and
aspirations of their founder.

But for a US president to lecture them about human rights and
the moral responsibilities of government is obscene. Is Obama serious? Is this
a person who is acting with all his faculties intact? Is this some kind of
satire or is this person quite literally mad, some sort of sociopath?

Human rights? The United States cares nothing for human
rights or the rule of law. This is the nation that steals the world's data,
spies on all peoples, has secret prisons, has kidnapped people off the streets,
tortures, assassinates with missiles from remotely piloted drones, backs
dictatorships, has created death squads, has toppled dozens of governments,
ravaged the planet with its conventional bombs and chemical weapons, launched
the world into the era of atomic warfare, and proliferates weapons on a scale
unparalleled by any other nation in world history. Its economic model is wed to
this system as it works in tandem with proxy regimes crushing dissent,
polluting, stealing resources and all but enslaving multitudes of workers in a
miasma of consumerist propaganda, lies and misery, driving many to flee and
seek a better life.

Human rights? Will no one in the prostituted media dispute
this? It's unbelievable that such statements are allowed uncontested and with
impunity.

Human rights? The United States backs some of the worst
abusers of human rights. Some of them are its closest allies.

The United States is responsible for at least a million
deaths in Vietnam, perhaps two and probably closer to three or four when taking
in the entirety of the Indochinese theatre. The war founded on lies was a
disgusting exercise in brutality. Even advocates of war will struggle to
justify the doctrines and actions implemented in this conflict. It is not an
exaggeration to raise the question of genocide. I find that very few Americans
have actually looked into the history of the war and probed the real nature of
what was happening on the ground. It was a monstrosity worthy of some of the
worst regimes in history.

The United States was not yet using depleted uranium which
has led to a spike in cancers and deformities in places like Iraq, Afghanistan
and Kosovo. And yet it used not only the hellish weapon of napalm but millions
of gallons of defoliants like Agent Orange which effectively served as chemical
weapons. Many of Vietnam's forests were destroyed and the people are still
suffering from the effects of the toxic spray that has infected the soil and
water.

The Vietnamese president should have paraded a long line of
children born with birth defects, and people with limbs blown off my US
landmines before the face of the so-called peace president. He might have put
them in orange jump-suits for further effect.

The Vietnamese should lecture Obama on US support for the
Khmer Rouge which Vietnam toppled. The US continued to support Pol Pot
throughout the remainder of the Carter and Reagan administrations. Where was
America's concern for human rights while supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge
responsible for nearly two million deaths in Cambodia?

But politics has its own ethics and its own historiography.

Obama did not apologize in Hiroshima as many Right-wing
commentators report. He lectured them and he lied.

He lied about history (as have many American historians) when
reporting the conclusion of the Asian War. The dropping of the bombs was not
necessary nor did it force the Japanese to surrender. That's just not telling
the whole story. It was not about saving lives, it was not morally justifiable
or an act of love as some heretical Christians will assert.

It's just not the case. There's more to the story. It
involves communications, the specificity of US demands with regard to
unconditional surrender, the status of Hirohito and certainly the Soviet
declaration of war. Truman's order to drop the bombs was little more than
wanton murder and the actions of a megalomaniac. They were signals sent to the
world that a new order was in place, a new era was upon the world. It was a
message to its allies, enemies and future enemies. It was one of the greatest
crimes of a war that was filled with black deeds almost unparalleled in world
history.

Capping this round of duplicitous diplomacy Obama pledges
once more to eliminate nuclear weapons and advocate for peace. This from a
war-mongering militarist who has laboured to spread chaos and death across the
Middle East and now Eastern Europe. The Right will decry this even though their
icon Reagan had the same vision with regard to nuclear weapons. He didn't
initially of course, but after watching 'The Day After', the Able Archer
debacle, and the ascent of Gorbachev, he began to change course. They came very
close to eliminating the bulk of nuclear weapons in Reykjavik but the talks
ultimately failed.

Obama pledged in Prague that he would work toward the
elimination of nuclear weapons but then has presided over the biggest increase
in nuclear spending, perhaps in history.

It's a word game. Under the rubric of 'modernization' the
United States is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and spending a trillion
dollars over the next couple of decades in order to do so.

What Obama clearly means is that everyone else should get rid
of their weapons but not the United States. America will continue to modernise
and expand its arsenal and continues to work toward developing tactical weapons
that are included in its battle plans. As these plans become public what can
other nations do but feel the need to proliferate in order to survive the
threats of the Great Terrorist Nation, the American Empire?

It is perhaps one of the most outrageous lies of his
administration and certainly one of the greatest lies of our generation. The
media is almost silent. There has been very little mainstream coverage and I
have yet to see a reporter call him out on his outrageous mendacity and deceit.
His peace prize is a travesty and discredits the already discredited Nobel
committee which has absurdly awarded the prize to figures like Henry Kissinger.

Obama's recent diplomatic escapades are not exercises in
capitulation or apology. They are displays of triumphalist imperialism,
sociopathic displays of American hubris and hypocrisy. The message is clear- We
own the world and we determine what is truth.